{roma} The contract to sell the ethnicity

Intersections I-III was created as a conclusion of the course development project (ELTE Department of Media and Communication) of PATTERNS Lectures.The event series temporarily resolved the contradictions inherent in engaged scholarship, which emerged earlier in the working process of the Roma Visual Lab.

The extended cinema event entitled Intersections I—Expanded Spaces—Half a Century of Gypsy and Redneck Manners, as approached by the members of the Independent Theatre Hungary, created the necessary system of connections at the Roma Parliament that paved the way for the subsequent symposium by “rewriting” (André Raatzsch) the films of the Balázs Béla Studio.

The aim of the symposium entitled Intersections II—Strategies 1957–2014 was, among other things, to invite for a collective thinking Roma intellectuals who have played and continue to play a defining role in the expected and indispensable process of institutionalization. In the presentations addressed to each other and to the audience of professionals, the guests portrayed the guiding principles of various periods and their personal intentions, supplemented by performative elements, in a colorful but systematizing fashion.

The event series in no way aimed to provide scholarly answers to the raised questions. It can be regarded as part of a process: its results and the extent to which these can be utilized (be it in a scholarly, artistic, or social manner) depends on the participants, as well as the attitude of the immediate and broader environment. This process, even before the results could become visible, was put into motion in the tranzit.hu space by the opening of the exhibition of the Sostar group, entitled {roma} The contract to sell the ethnicity (Intersections III). The disturbance created by the political art action—of an avant-garde orientation, in the classical sense—curated by André Raatzsch, is an integral part of continuing the work that has been started.